Woman and Child in the Grass (Femme avec enfant sur l'herbe)

Woman and Child in the Grass, 1898, held at the Barnes Foundation, belongs to Renoir's sustained engagement with outdoor domestic subjects in the 1890s. During this decade he was spending time at Essoyes in Burgundy (his wife Aline's home village) and at various Norman and southern French locations, painting the gentle pleasures of rural leisure. Mother-and-child subjects were among his most commercially successful and personally satisfying, combining his love of the female figure, his tenderness toward children, and his commitment to painting light and colour in nature rather than in the studio.

The composition balances the two figures within a freely indicated garden setting, with Renoir's characteristic feathery brushwork building grass and foliage through varied short strokes of green, yellow-green, and blue. The figures are painted with somewhat more deliberate blending, their warm tones set off against the cool outdoor light.